Tuesday, April 3, 2012

During this Sunday's Watchtower study, a letter will be read to all congregations. The letter states that, starting in January, the Watchtower and Awake! magazines will go from 32 pages, down to 16 pages.

Why?

Print has become a dead media, even for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Moving operations online dramatically cuts costs. Think about it...

How many of those magazines were legitimately "placed" out in field service? My family would order a dozen copies of each issue. Back in the day, we regularly had a stack of 50-60 magazines laying around the house. It got to the point where we would leave an old Watchtower in the door, regardless of whether anyone was home or not.

A couple of years back, the organization scaled down their printing operations to only one "public" issue of the Watchtower and Awake! each month, with a second, super secret issue of the Watchtower made available to members of the Church.

Today, they claim that they're printing 42 million copies of each issue today. I don't buy it. If they are, the amount of waste is staggering. Speaking for myself, I regularly shred 8-10 magazines a month...and that's just the ones I randomly come across in doctor's offices. (Just imagine how easy it will be to shred Watchtowers that are half as thick.)

After years of having elders warn their congregations about the "dangers" of the internet and social media, it seems that the Society has reversed their position when it comes to their interests. In the coming months, Jehovah's Witnesses are going to be consolidating their three websites into one, and focus the majority of their proselytizing to the World Wide Web.

Now, you can read the latest issue of the Watchtower, and have your favorite kiddie porn site open in the next tab. That's a joke, of course. We all know that only elders and ministerial servants watch kiddie porn.

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About Me

38, queer, poly, happily married punk and stay at home dad to my five-year-old, Elle. In June of 2009, I was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome, and PTSD a month later. I have been on disability since. In recent months, I have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia,Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Sjogren's Syndrome, a Chiari malformation, small fiber neuropathy, Type 1 Diabetes, and have a massive benign cyst in my brain. And, to top it all off, I was diagnosed with lupus in March of 2014.
I haven't been writing as often as I would like to lately. Trying to catch up on some lost time. Please forgive me.
I'm an anarchist and an atheist. My political views are too far left to even be considered Democrat. I believe that marriage and health care are fundamental human rights. And don't get me started on people calling themselves "pro-life", and denying education and food stamps to children.